Maggie's Graphic Arts Blog: The New Language of Form

A New Language of Form

Maggie Merkin

ARTH 230-01

T. Long

World War I and the Russian Revolution both took their toll on Russia as a whole, as the Czar and the royal family were overthrown and executed, civil war broke out, and political and societal turmoil and trauma continued to plague the country. However, a brief era of creative arts saw a decade of Russian artists become influenced by the cubism and futurism movements, coining the term cubo-futurism. Throughout this artistic era, many innovations in typography and design came about. After the Russian Telegraph Agency was created, poster art began being produced to support the Red Army in the civil war. They were composed of straightforward designs, crude stencil illustrations, and exaggerated historical and societal events so that they could be easily read and understood by a largely illiterate or semiliterate audience. At first the posters’ illustrations and designs were primarily hand copied, but in 1920 they began being produced with stencils, so that they could easily produce hundreds of copies each day. Of the artists that contributed to these poster designs, Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) proved to be especially innovative. Malevich was born near Kiev in the Kiev Governorate of Russia to a Polish family. After the death of his father, he moved to Moscow, and studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Later in life, he founded a painting style that consisted of basic forms and pure color that he dubbed suprematism, creating elemental geometric abstraction that was new and innovative, as well as nonobjective. He believed that the essence of art was the perpetual effect of both color and form, and explored these beliefs in works such as the 1915 Suprematist Composition and the cover of Pervyi tsikl lektsii (First Circle of Lectures), creating concrete elements of color and shape in both pieces. He continued to create his pieces with expressive qualities that were developed from the intuitive organization of the forms and colors within the piece. The De Stijl movement began in the Netherlands in the summer of 1917 by founder Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931). Artists in this movement worked in abstract geometric styles, and sought universal laws of balance and harmony for art. Painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was born in Amersfoort in the Netherlands, and was introduced to art at an early age. In 1892, he attended the Academy for Fine Art in Amsterdam, and from there launched a career in primary education as well as painting. His work was naturalistic and impressionistic, and was largely of landscapes, and in 1911, he moved from painting these traditional landscapes to a symbolic painting style that was influenced by Van Gogh and expressed the forces of nature. He was also influenced by the philosopher M.H.J. Schoenmakers, who defined the horizontal and the vertical as the two fundamental opposites that shape our world, while, the colors red, yellow, and blue are the three principal colors. This influenced Mondrian to paint purely abstract paintings that were composed of horizontal and vertical lines, as well as those three principal colors. Artists like Mondrian reduced their visual vocabulary to the use of both primary and neutral colors, flat planes, rectangular and square shapes, as well as straight, horizontal and vertical lines, thus, making much of their work incredibly similar. These two movements and artists were both extremely innovative and influential in the design and abstract arts that we know today, and provided a new language in art for form, shape, and color.

Piet Mondrian, "Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red," 1937